


i repay my gods by never dying how i'm told

by futuredescending



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Clones, Clones for Days, M/M, Pining, Shiro (Voltron)-centric, post-Season Seven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 09:21:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15660309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futuredescending/pseuds/futuredescending
Summary: They’re not Shiro, Shiro thinks, and then, half hysterically, considers the possibility that maybe there never was a Shiro at all.





	i repay my gods by never dying how i'm told

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone who knows me knows clones are my _thing_.
> 
> Title is from kristin chang's poem, [necromancy](http://therumpus.net/2018/07/rumpus-original-poetry-three-poems-by-kristin-chang/)

Shiro wakes up to a world tinted in shades of rose. Literally. He’s in some sort of cryopod, barely large enough to contain him, but it’s quiet, dark. There’s no more power. It might as well be his coffin.

He tries pounding on the glass for someone to let him out, and then, when no one appears to come to his aid, with more desperation. Wild, harder, curling his fingers into fists.

The glass is thick. It doesn’t break.

Stay calm.

Don’t let fear cloud your ability to think.

Patience yields focus.

Shiro stops and takes in a deep, steadying breath. He still has oxygen. There is time.

He looks down at his fists, and only belatedly realizes both of them are real, made of flesh, a part of him. No more metal or whirring motors. Just breakable, yielding, soft flesh.

He cannot think about this now. He must focus on the problem at hand: getting out.

There are small, hairline cracks in the glass. Those are the weakest points.

He draws both his fists back until his elbows hit the bottom of the pod. He takes a deep breath and holds it.

His fists shoot out with a sharp grunt. His knuckles collide with the fine white lines in the glass, spiderwebbing them out just a little bit more.

There's a beat, and then he feels the pain bloom in his hands, radiating down his arms, lingering the worst in his bruised, red knuckles.

He does it again and again and again until he is screaming through his teeth and cannot feel his hands. Until rivulets of blood run down his arms and splatter across his face. Until his fist punches through the glass.

When he finally emerges from the cryopod, it is to a world littered with the still-burning wreckage of something that has met an unfortunate end. Not a ship, he knows from what remains that is still partially identifiable, but there is nothing surrounding him except for rock and forest.

Other pods similar to the one he awoke in are littered amongst the ruins. He stumbles over shattered glass and warped beams to the closest one to check for other survivors. The rose-colored glass is dark and hard to peer through, but when he leans in close and processes what he’s seeing, he shouts and reels back, scrambling over the uneven ground like he’s forgotten how to use his legs.

His palm accidentally makes contact with hot metal and he screams, cradling his wounded hand to his chest. His right hand. The one he shouldn't have and the one he certainly shouldn’t be feeling.

He stares down at the red, blistering skin and tries to calm his racing heart.

When he is measurably calmer and half convinced he simply hallucinated what he saw, he tentatively approaches he cryopod again. He leans down and looks closely, but this time, instead of jerking back in fear, the breath is punched out of him and his throat closes up in sinking, inevitable dread.

For he looks down into the cryopod and he sees himself.

 

_____

 

Most of the clones, at least the ones that remained fairly intact through whatever had caused the wreckage around him, are lifeless dolls. Some of the cryopods had broken open, the bodies they contained burned up beyond all recognition, steeping the air with the stench of burning human flesh.

Somehow, Shiro knows those bodies are him as well.

On and on, a bleak sea of destruction and bodies. A graveyard.

The smell is too much, as is the thick heat, the noxious smoke. Shiro falls to his knees and dry heaves because there is nothing in his stomach. The dry ground bites into his palms. The sun sears the back of his neck 

A shadow falls over his curled up form. A hand touches his shoulder, startling him.

He yelps and tries to lash out, but only catches air, overbalances, and stumbles forward until he falls back to the ground.

He looks up into a mirror of his own equally terrified face.

 

_____

 

They are six, in total, the survivors. He is them. They are him.

They share exactly the same memories. The first time they see snow glazing the spindly cherry tree branches in the backyard when they are five. Getting wonderfully, blissfully drunk on jungle juice in the first year at the Garrison and the equally hideous hangover the next morning. The sharp scent of blood, excrement, and fear in the Galra arenas. The last time they are in the Black Lion, her primal force running through their veins, adrenaline curdling in their stomach, iron at the back of their throat, rushing towards Zarkon, do or die.

They know what it feels like to have the thread of life pull taut and then snap off, that sickening sudden darkness that is the end.

They now know what it is like to have everything they know in life be a lie. To be a lie themselves by virtue of existing. Abominations.

It is disorienting to have memories that clash so vividly with such stark empirical evidence to the contrary. Both of their arms are intact. Their hair is black. Their bodies are free of the scars from injuries they can viscerally recall receiving. The scar on their knee from falling out of a tree when they were eight. A knife wound to the gut from one of their earliest arena fights, and all the various scars that quickly accumulate thereafter. The slash across his face to forever mark him for his insolence the first time he spat into Sendak’s face. All gone.

“The Galra did this,” he says.

“Haggar,” he says. “Only she would have stooped to something so dark and twisted.”

“But why?” he asks. “Why do this in the first place? What could she have hoped to achieve?”

“Whatever she was planning, I don’t know if it succeeded.” Shiro looks down at this bandaged hand and thinks about how he found himself. There were so many more, created for something. But someone must have intervened.

“Does the team know?” he asks.

The thought makes him sick to his stomach. Do they know he’s missing? Do they think he’s dead?

“Is one of us there with them right now?”

Interacting with them. Laughing. Taking meals with them. Training with them. Smiling reluctantly at Lance’s latest outburst. Flying Black. Planning with Allura. Putting a hand to Keith’s back in comfort.

Is he there? Is the plan still happening? Does danger still remain?

No one else speaks after that. Some thoughts are better left unsaid.

 

_____

 

Only, they never find out.

Another insipid anniversary clip is playing on the vidscreen hanging over the bar. The bright gaudy words are stamped over footage of Voltron standing proudly after having vanquished its enemy of the week: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO VOLTRON?

Shiro can’t help but suspect Haggar’s plan must have succeeded after all. Voltron is gone, the Castle is gone, and the Galra, like a virus, are slowly taking over the universe once again, like everything Shiro has ever worked towards, _died for_ , didn’t even matter.

So he walls up his grief. Wills it to not exist, or at least, pushes it so far down inside himself that it sits in his chest like another dull ache he simply learns to live with. A scar that should stripe his skin. They weren’t really his team, he tells himself. The sentiments that are attached to these memories are as fabricated as his body.

He finishes off the last slightly blue-tinted dregs in his glass and tosses down a few units before pushing away from the bar. Alcohol, or the alien equivalent thereof, has also helped. He didn’t used to be much of a drinker, but desperate times, et al. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he catches sight of one of them. He meets his eyes for a moment, then he looks away. Moves past him out of the bar and doesn’t look back

Through the years, for whatever reason, they have stayed together. Obviously, they can’t all congregate in the same place at the same time, but it has never occurred to any one of them to make his own way. They all have the same flawed group-think: We’re stronger together. 

Some of them at least put in a superficial amount of effort to change their appearance. Different hair styles. Colors. Styles of dress. Optical wear. The only permanent differences among them are a scarred thigh on one and a burned palm on another, both garnered from the ruins of their violent birth. It’s not really enough to fool anyone who’s actually looking, but no one ever really does.

The most he’s ever received has been the always bittersweet, _You remind me of that Voltron Paladin guy_. And no one, rightfully, thinks that he actually is.

Out on the rainy crowded street, he senses someone walking too close to him. Already knows who it is.

“You’re drinking too much,” he says. “We don’t know the long-term effects of alien alcohol on the human system.”

Shiro snorts. “Trust me, the thought occurred to me too.”

“We’re not expendable, even if we were intended to be.”

“We’re not even unique,” he says. “We think the same things. We act the same way.”

“Do we?” he asks, looking at him pointedly.

“We were the spares. And when whatever operation that was supposed to happen was over, we would have been disposed of. Maybe we should have been. We’re a mistake either way you look at it.”

“So that’s your theory.”

“You can’t tell me you didn’t consider the same.”

He tilts his head in concession, because of course he did. Nothing is ever a surprise among them. The only variation is what gets expressed out loud and what does not.

Their conversations are so fucking boring.

 

_____

 

“Do you ever think about him?” he asks one night. They’re supposed to be asleep, side by side on the floor in a little shabby studio apartment they rent in the worst part of the city. They all wake up at some point during the night via nightmare or insomnia. Odds are good of catching another one who’s already up.

“Who?”

He arches a brow. “Really?”

He sighs, annoyed. “We’re really going to do this now?”

He shrugs. “Who else can I talk to about it?”

It was a fair point. Besides, it’s basically like talking to himself. “You already know the answer.”

“Do we dream about him in the same way?”

Shiro considers it. It’s a good question, actually. How similar is their subconscious? “I don’t know. I guess you would have to tell me about your dreams.”

He gives Shiro an assessing look. “Maybe those are things we should keep to ourselves.”

The way Keith’s hair falls into his face when he’s frustrated. The way a rare, reluctant smile can transform his face. Twilight painted across his skin. Sighing in the dark, skin smooth and pale. A slender, elegant thigh circling his waist. Hair as dark as pitch, plastered in sweaty clumps to his temples. Swollen lips parted in pleasure.

Jealously guarding his dreams, the few precious things that are solely _his_.

It makes them laugh after a moment, in unison, the same skeptical pitch and despair. The suddenness of the sound stirs the others into consciousness. They’re light sleepers.

Dreams. From the way they take turns furtively disappearing into the bathroom in the middle of the night, he’s pretty sure there’s not a lot diversity happening there.

 

_____

 

One night, one of the nearby tenement buildings catches fire. The building materials are so flimsy, the whole thing goes up in minutes.

There is still an entire family on one of the upper floors, screaming for help out the windows. Crying.

Shiro doesn’t even think twice. He runs into the flames, up the decrepit stairs that are falling apart beneath his feet. Looks behind him to see the others following close behind.

In the end, the only way out is through the windows. They each wordlessly take responsibility for a family member. The little boy clings so tightly to Shiro’s neck, he practically chokes him, but it’s okay. He painstakingly climbs down the four stories to the ground, from ledge to ledge. 

They save the whole family, but they don’t save all of themselves.

Six go in, five come out. They can’t even stick around to claim the body.

They’re supposed to be disposable, it’s not even supposed to matter, but Shiro can’t stop shaking. He can’t sleep either, so he goes to the bar and he drinks until he doesn’t want to peel off his phantom burning, blistering skin anymore.

He wordlessly sits down beside him and orders the same. “I told him he drank too much.”

Shiro laughs, then presses his hand to his mouth because he can’t stop making the sound.

 

_____

 

Sometimes, he thinks, Maybe we should carry on the fight. It’s not over yet. People still need help. Voltron is gone, but the Coalition can live on. It troubles him to know that people are fighting and dying all over the universe, and he is doing nothing.

Another part of him just wants to go home again. Wants to give up and forget this whole fight. Game over for him anyway. What’s stopping him?

But then he thinks about what would happen if they give in to any impulse. About the looks on people’s faces when they show up, the pieces of the puzzle they’ll quickly put together. The disgust. The horror. The fear, and then the hatred. The question that wouldn’t be who, but _what_.

They’re not Shiro, Shiro thinks, and then, half hysterically, considers the possibility that maybe there never was a Shiro at all.

 

_____

 

News from Earth comes out slowly if it does at all. It’s not like it’s a very important planet. The universe considers it a backwater, by all accounts. But when, just like that, Voltron makes a reappearance after more than three years of radio silence to not only liberate Earth from Sendak, but defeat Sendak himself...well, word travels like wildfire.

Earth is the home planet of the Paladins, they say. They almost didn’t make it.

Takashi Shirogane is Earth’s unanimously elected new leader, the rumors circulate. He’s captain of a new cruiser-class ship called Atlas. They say it can transform into its own mech. Both the ship and him get a new media nickname: The White Lion. Cute.

They watch the broadcast of his speech. He is both different from them and achingly similar. He is everything they imagine themselves to be in their heads, like he is more real. The realest of them all. The scars. A new but still so clearly weaponized arm. His hair is entirely white. The ordeals he’s suffered are writ largely across his body. People trust him because they know he’s been through so much but hasn’t given up hope. He is the physical embodiment of what it means to survive.

“He doesn’t look evil,” he says.

“No. There’s something different about him,” he says.

“Do you think he’s…?”

“As close as any of us can be.”

“Should we…?” See him. Meet him. Tell him.

They all want to. Badly. Every time his charismatic visage appears on the screen, their eyes are drawn to him. Compelled. It stirs up a fiercely deep longing that Shiro cannot explain. This is the one who gets to stay with the team, the one who gets to be the real Shiro.

But they also know the what-if’s. How badly it all can go. What if he doesn’t know? What if he’s happy?

“We should at least determine if he’s still under Haggar’s control,” he says. “We have a responsibility to make sure.”

“We should try to be discreet,” he says. “We won’t talk to him unless we have to. If he’s happy, then we should leave him alone.”

“And the rest of the team?”

Shiro swallows. Digs his fingernails into his palm. He wants to go home so badly. He wants to see them. He wants them to see _him_. Misses them like missing the most important part of himself.

“They were never really ours.”

 

_____

 

Earth’s Leader meets with other Coalition leaders around the universe. He shakes hands, holds babies, poses for selfies, gives stirring speeches, goes on talk shows to do interviews.

Voltron won’t fail you again, he reassures the universe. We will all live in peace and prosperity if we stay and work together for it.

They watch him, distantly, like ghosts watching the living going about their lives. Scrutinizing him for any hint of malice or foul play. They don’t find any.

Instead, they discover a man who is painfully lonely, who masks his misery with his commitment to duty, and no one else in the universe can see it. They see the man who will always say the right thing at the right time because that’s what everyone expects. He is very, very good at being what people want him to be.

“He misses being a Paladin,” he says. “He misses Black. He misses the team.”

“He has his own ship.”

“It’s not really the same though. Everything is so much bigger, more bureaucratic. Complex. Sometimes the will to do good is just not enough.”

“Did you ever think we would end up as little more than a politician after all that?” he asks.

“What does it matter? We were never supposed to live long enough to worry about it.”

Kerberos should have been his swan song, Shiro thinks. It would have been a nice note to have gone out on. Not this pointless and unasked for reboot.

 

_____

 

There’s a celebratory parade with Voltron in attendance, and they can’t help taking advantage of the opportunity to finally see the team in person. Somehow, Hunk has grown even larger, strength and power so obviously evident in his massive wall of a body. Pidge’s hair has grown out to shoulder length. She’s taller, longer, curvier. Lance is surprisingly more serious. He wears his hair shorter, almost closely shaved. Allura no longer wears her crown, there's a lot less imperial sheen on her these days. She seems so much more grounded.

It’s astounding at how much they’ve changed, and not just physically. Their experiences are forged into every confident line of their stances. The proud set of their shoulders. The light in their eyes. Shiro remembers them having bumbled their way out of Earth’s atmosphere as naive, painfully green school children. Now, they’re battle-tested warriors, all of them.

And then there’s Keith.

Keith is something else entirely. Not just the height or the broader shoulders or the filled out frame, not the sharper angles of his face or the maturity carved into his features. He looks...content, like he has finally found his purpose in life and gets to fulfill it.

Shiro envies him.

Over three years apart, and he’s never felt so far away from them as he has today when he’s never been physically closer.

Up on the stage, he watches Earth’s Leader give a rousing speech, then move down the line, shaking each Paladin’s hand, military brisk, ending with Keith. There is a longer pause than with the others. An extended shared look belying the professional clasp of their hands.

But then Earth’s Leader abruptly drops his hand, gives Keith a politely dismissive nod, and moves off to the side to let the crowd thunderously cheer the universe’s heroes. Nobody even takes note of his departure when he descends the stage stairs and disappears into the crowd.

 

_____

 

As soon as the door to his private quarters closes and locks, Shiro slumps and feels like his entire energy has been drained from his body. His chin hits his chest. He stares down at his polished dress shoes. They pinch. His reward for being an obedient show pony.

He acknowledges that it’s difficult seeing the team again. They’ve spent the past year out in the universe as a force for good and have come back changed by their experiences. Closer to each other than anyone else. They’ve discovered and experienced things with Voltron that no one, not even its prior paladins, could ever have imagined.

He wants to be happy for them. He _is_ happy for them.

He sighs and straightens, his hand immediately reaching up to loosen the knot of his tie and unbutton the top few buttons of his shirt. His feet take him to over to the sideboard on autopilot by now, hands moving in muscle memory to pour himself a drink. He takes the first sip with a little too much ease.

“I guess we’re not so different after all.”

Shiro jumps and nearly drops his glass as he quickly turns to face his intruder and...and comes face to face with himself.

Stunned, all thoughts and words flee in the wake of his shock. 

The other him is...older and younger. There’s a hardness to his eyes, but he’s far less visibly marked by his experiences than Shiro himself. A more complete, kintsugi version of himself. He’s given a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry. I know this must come as a shock.”

“N-no,” he stutters, clawing back the remnants of his voice. “I...I know who you are. I know where you must have...come from.”

This doesn’t produce a flicker of surprise so much as a nod of acceptance. “Then are you one as well?”

His fingers tighten on the glass as he considers the very real possibility that this other clone could have less than benign intentions. He curls in the fingers of his cybernetic arm and soothes himself with the faint hum of its power. “Yes...and no. It’s complicated.”

“The last thing I remember,” his clone says, looking lost, “is fighting Zarkon. Then I woke up on a planet to a sea of dead bodies wearing my face all around me.”

I did that, Shiro thinks hysterically. I was trying to kill you all, and couldn’t even get that one right.

His clone snaps himself from whatever macabre reverie he was caught up in, meeting his eyes with a painfully familiar earnestness. “Will you tell me everything that’s happened since?”

He doesn’t know why, but Shiro does. By the time he’s finished, they are sitting side by side on the couch in mirrored positions, elbows resting on knees, leaning forward like they can’t let themselves ever truly relax.

“For what it’s worth,” the other him says, “I don’t think you were evil. I think whatever Haggar did to overtake your mind made you do evil things, but it was never you, not even before your spirit was transferred into the body you have now. I don’t consider myself evil. Do you?”

Shiro gives him a long once over before he’s forced to admit, “No. No I don’t.”

“Well,” his clone sighs, “I guess we’ve settled that big question once and for all. The others will be...satisfied, at least, to know.”

“Others…?”

“There are five us in total. There used to be six, but….” A haunted look flickers across his eyes before quickly disappearing. “We’ve been keeping tabs. Well, ever since you came back.”

Five of them. Five of _him_. Shiro swallows. The alcohol is sitting more uneasily in his stomach. “What happens now?”

The clone sighs. “I don’t know. We’ll...stay away, I guess. Try and disappear. Let you live the life you were meant to lead.”

And Shiro can’t help it: he starts laughing. It’s bitter and lined with an alarming edge of desperation. “What I was meant for.”

When he finally manages to get himself back under control and look up, the clone is suddenly so much closer. Shiro startles, having not even sensed him. “You said this body you’re in is one of ours. If so, then this should work.”

“What should work?” he asks, voice thinned with fear.

His clone answers by reaching out with both hands and pressing his fingers hard into Shiro’s temples. Instinctively, Shiro tries to shake him off, back away, but—

He feels something snap in his mind. Turn on. Flip of the switch.

Shiro finally manages to bat his hands away as he scrambles back to the furthest end of the couch. “What did you do to me? What are….”

And then he sees himself at the end of the couch, curled up in panic, once finely pressed and starched clothes now hopelessly wrinkled. He looks tired, pale and drawn. Thinner, too. He’s been unable to keep up the vigorous physical regimen he used to wake up like clockwork for in the very early mornings. Now he wakes up two hours from when he managed to fall asleep to emergency calls from his people who need him to help put out the latest fire.

And he sees himself sitting opposite, black hair and both arms still outstretched, skin unmarred. Hopeful and sad and apologetic—

—Among the crowds at the assembly, neck craned up to the skies, watching Voltron soar overhead with a nearly deafening roar—

—Sitting at an outdoor cafe, the crowd heard even from this distance, following Voltron’s progress as it flies over the busy little street with its little boutique shops and restaurants—

—Looking out the observatory window in the nearby building, fifty-sixth floor. Getting an even closer look at Voltron, trying to imagine he can see each Paladin inside—

—Attention glued to a large vidscreen on the side of a building that’s showing Voltron’s live progress, standing still in the middle of the sidewalk in the city square with everyone else, as the speakers blare out some announcer’s inane commentary—

He shuts his eyes and shakes his head, but the images, the awareness, remains. It feels crowded, noisy, too much. “What is this?”

“It’s us,” he says. “It’s you.”

He wants to scream a denial, but he can’t, he can’t. It feels too true now. What is seen cannot be unseen. His vision grows blurry. He can only choke out a, “Why?”

But he knows why. Of course he does. They all do. It is with them when they move down the street, when the rain falls from the sky, when they are on a crowded train. In meetings. Behind Atlas’s main control station. Watching the ruins of the destroyed, burnt out tenement building get bulldozed to make way for gentrification. When he’s among the stars. When his bodies are scattered among the wreckage of an isolated planet.

When he stares into his own face. Looks up at the water damaged ceiling in the middle of the night. Touches himself, imagining paler hands around him instead, warm lips at his neck, the weight of a leaner build pressing down upon him. Wanting what he can never have.

It is always there in the back of his mind, even when he tries to ignore it.

“So you can be a little bit less alone.”

 

_____

 

Keith bewilderingly has to clear something like four checkpoints. He probably wouldn’t have even been allowed this far had it not been for his status as a Voltron Paladin. Now, he’s asked to wait. Leader Shirogane is very busy, they tell him. He may not even be able to see him after the meeting concludes either, but they’ll see.

So Keith sits and waits and tries not to wonder if Shiro is being driven crazy by all of this. Keith’s barely been here for fifteen minutes and he already wants to run away screaming.

Finally, after another ten minutes goes by, the door hisses open and a stream of officials files out of the conference room, barely even glancing at him as they pass. Shiro is the last to emerge.

Keith stands up and calls out, “Shiro!” much to the displeasure of the office staff. He doesn’t care.

Shiro pauses and looks up from the tablet that had been consuming his attention and Keith had been about to step forward to greet him, but he stops in his tracks.

There’s something...different. Keith can’t pinpoint it. But it’s….

“Hi, Keith,” Shiro says, giving him a soft smile. It should be comforting, that familiar vein of fond warmth, but it’s not. It’s like someone is wearing Shiro’s face, but that’s not quite right either. “This is a surprise.”

Keith grits his teeth and stubbornly forges past the strange feeling. “I was wondering if you wanted to have lunch together. It’s been awhile. I’d love to catch up.” He and Acxa are trying out something official now. His mother has revived the Blades almost back to their previous numbers. He can now teleport in Black with ease, their relationship has become so seamless.

He wants to tell Shiro all these things, wants the other man to be proud of him, but Shiro just looks at him with the bland indulgence he usually reserves for young cadets or pompous, long-winded officials. “That sounds nice. I really wish I could, Keith, but I’m afraid I have to attend another meeting now, and it’ll be like that for the rest of the day. Perhaps you can pencil something in with my assistant. I think my schedule should be more free in a few weeks, if you’re still here.”

Keith feels like he’s been slapped in the face. He manages to stutter, “Y-yeah. I’ll do that.”

“Great. Still, it was nice of you to stop by. Thank you,” Shiro says before his expression clouds over once more. He touches Keith’s shoulder—briefly, as if he’s already distracted—before he turns and walks away, leaving Keith staring after him, wondering what just happened.

And beneath it all, as ridiculous as it seems, Keith can’t shake the unnerving, impossible feeling that there were _others_ there, somehow.

Watching.

Listening.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm sorry.
> 
>  
> 
> [tumblr](http://futuredescending.tumblr.com)


End file.
